7/07/2010 @ 2:15PM

The Case Against The Ground Zero Mosque

Given what they regularly put up with–the crowded, overheated subways, outrageous rents, the occasional terrorist attack–New Yorkers tend to be an uncomplaining lot. So when they do complain, it’s usually about something relatively large. Lately the issue roiling New Yorkers is a proposed Islamic community center to be built at the edge of Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 suicide attacks. Some are protesting the proposed building, while others are protesting the protesters. Of the latter, I often am tempted to ask if they are sadomasochists, or simply stupid; on kinder days, I think of them as simply uninformed.

Everyone who was in New York at the time remembers what happened that day, when 19 Muslim men stopped the world, when ash and dust and human remains coated the streets of downtown Manhattan, when New York became something we never imagined it could be.

And yet New York never turned its back on Islam. Indeed, just after the attacks, New Yorkers welcomed the offer of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Alsaud (whose holdings include EuroDisney, the Four Seasons and
Citigroup
) to provide $10 million in recovery funds–until they learned he had paid some three times as much to suicide bombers in Palestine and blamed America for the attack. In a city of 140 mosques–including the mosque and Muslim-only apartment complex (built with aid from Saudi Arabia and Libya) on East 96th Street on the Upper East Side–none of them in the days following the events of 9/11 was torched. Muslims around the country then were subjected to racism and worse, but not in New York City.

So to say, as some have, that New York is anti-Islam and against the building of mosques is simply inaccurate.

What is true is this:

The proposed “Cordoba Center”–a 13-story building that would house a bookstore, auditorium, basketball court and mosque–is expected to cost $100 million. It will be built on the site of the former Burlington Coat Factory, whose roof was destroyed by falling debris from the towers on that fateful September morning, just 600 feet from where they stood. Set to replace the current al-Farah mosque located 12 blocks north in Tribeca, the project is the inspiration of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, whose father built the enormous 96th St. complex in 1984 and who positions himself as “the antiterrorist,” a peacemaker. The Center has earned endorsements from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and prominent rabbis, along with funding from the Hunt Alternative Fund, the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Fund (whose director of grants programs, Taleb Salhab, founded the Coalition for Peace and Justice in Palestine and is the former director of the Palestine Aid Society of America) and the government of Qatar.

But is Ground Zero the place for the largest mosque in New York City? And can it really be called a show of “respect” and “peacemaking,” as Rauf claims, to build it there when so many members of the community and families of the victims of 9/11 find the very idea insulting and obscene? Wouldn’t it be kinder to acknowledge these feelings and honor them? What would be the reaction, after all, of the Lebanese should Jews propose a synagogue on the camps of Shabra and Shatila, where Israeli forces oversaw the massacre of hundreds?

There is, too, a certain danger: With emotions so high, it is hard to overlook the risk that both the mosque and, indeed, the worshipers could face retaliation. (Hence my mention of sadomasochism, above.)

Not to mention that $100 million cost. $100 million? To build a tribute to peace and tolerance, they need $100 million? Couldn’t that money be better spent, say, aiding Haiti? Building an inter-cultural children’s center for the poor? Does it really have to be the biggest mosque in New York City? East End Synagogue, which has won awards for its architectural beauty, opened just a few years ago in a renovated mansion at a cost of a mere $7.5 million. And interestingly, in 2008, the Temple Israel of Jamaica, Queens, was transformed, in a simple, interfaith ceremony, into the Bait-Uz Zafar mosque.

Bigger questions arise over potential funding sources. The majority of U.S. mosques are sponsored by Saudi Arabia, where extreme Wahabbist Islam reigns supreme. Wahabbist Islam is what stands behind the Salafist philosophies that drive people like Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, to commit their jihadist acts. It is preached in U.S. prisons by Saudi-sponsored imams, extolled in books that sell through U.S. mosques run by Saudi-sponsored imams, and taught in the Saudi-sponsored Islamic schools of Europe. If the $100 million–or any major part of it–is to come from Saudi Arabia, Imam Rauf’s good intentions will not likely matter very much.

After all, Rauf apparently has Saudi allies: He echoed Prince Alwaleed in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, saying, “The U.S. and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.” Moreover, he added, “The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians. But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.”

Here we come to the name of the proposed Center, which highlights Rauf’s scathing bends and twists of facts: Cordoba. (Perhaps significantly, the organization Rauf created around it is similarly named the Cordoba Initiative.) Cordoba, after all, was conquered in 711 by the Muslim Berber Gen. Tarik ibn Zayad, and by 756 became the capital of the Cordoba Caliphate, which covered most of Spain. Christian and Jewish civilians in that time were regularly murdered and enslaved. Among the first things the conquerors did under the new Caliphate was replace the Christian Church of Saint Vincent with the Great Mosque of Cordoba–now the third-largest edifice in the Islamic world.

Some have argued–quite persuasively–that this is New York, not Riyadh; America, not Iran. The owners of the land have the right to do with it what they will, and there is certainly nothing illegal or inherently dangerous about building a mosque. But this, too, comes at the center of America’s vulnerability to Saudi influence: Prince Alwaleed’s ownership of
Rupert
Murdoch’s
Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corp.
has already affected the wording of broadcasts on Fox News; Saudi ownership of U.S. mosques has already dictated much of what is preached there. Consequently, even if Rauf is the peacemaker he claims to be, this does not assure us that his backers won’t at some point replace him–either during his lifetime or after–with someone more in their line of thinking, as they’ve been known to do in Europe. Nor can we exactly listen in on Rauf’s sermons without, in effect, spying–defying the very principles of our democracy. So we’re trapped.

What emerges, then, is a potential symbol of victory at the site of one of Islam’s most horrific acts in history. “We destroyed the World Trade Centers,” the radical Islam world will say, “and replaced it with a mosque–there, in the financial hub of New York City, the capitalist center of the world.” First Cordoba, then Cordoba.

The upshot of it all, then, has been that this project, aimed at creating unity, has fomented indignation, fury and suspicion, forging a split between communities where previously there was none.